Part 2:
The Hospital. After speaking with DAN, they gave me two phone numbers to call the hospital. I called the Costa Med Hospital in Cozumel and no one picked up the phone. Are you kidding me? This is a hospital and they don't answer the phone? I called DAN again and he gave me two more phone numbers. I called those numbers and after no answers repeatedly, and then finally getting through a phone tree of press this, press that, I got a real person 20 minutes after I talked to DAN. After describing my symptoms, the person asked if I wanted an ambulance. I felt capable of walking down to the lobby of the hotel and getting a cab, but he said there were no cabs in Cozumel at 1:30 a.m., so I agreed to the ambulance. (I had not rented a car for the trip.) He said it would be about 20 minutes. After waiting 30 minutes, I called, asked where the ambulance was and he said 15 more minutes. After 45 minutes, I called again. The person says, "You are at the Westin, right?" I said, "No, I told you I'm at the Wyndham Hotel Cozumel." He said, "The ambulance is at the Westin. I'll send them to you. It'll be 10 minutes." Finally, after an hour, I'm picked up. Had this been a life-threatening event, I would be dead in the hotel parking lot by the time they arrived. And as a side note, I noticed cab drivers in the hotel parking lot, so I could have taken a cab.
After arriving at the ER, they did the usual stuff, take your vitals, ask you what's wrong. They asked me about my dive profile. I brought my dive computer with me so I could accurately recite the depths I had been diving. More talk, more people in and out. They put me on oxygen. There must have been eight different people coming in and out asking me the same questions. I finally saw the ER doctor, but not a dive medicine doctor. I asked when I could see the dive doctor. They told me he was at home and would be in in about 3-4 hours. Uh, what? I asked why he won't come in right now, and they said he uses his judgment whether he comes in based on what his staff tells him about the patient. I'm not happy about that. It was too inconvenient for him to come to the hospital to look at a dive accident patient.
Here's where it gets scary. More time goes by, then a male nurse comes in, doesn't say a word, doesn't introduce himself, doesn't make eye contact, and starts to lay out what looks to be an IV setup. I asked him, "What is that?" He said in broken English, "IV". I said, "Why?" He said, "That's what the doctor wants." I said, "Send in the doctor." The ER doctor comes in and says that this is "standard protocol" for dive accident cases. I said, "Why do you want to put in an IV if you don't even know what's wrong yet?" Again, he says it's standard protocol. Okay. I reluctantly concede because the doctors knows best. Right? Mr. Male Nurse comes back and is not wearing a name tag, so I asked him his name and he said Avro (pronounced Av-row).
Avro then starts tapping various veins in my arms but picks a vein on the top of my left arm just above the wrist bone to insert the needle. Having had surgery before, I've had IVs in my hands but not above the wrist. Very robotically, he goes in and he misses the vein. It hurt quite a bit and I said, "You missed the vein and that really hurt." He says nothing, pulls the needle back out and goes in again. He missed again. Now it's raging pain and I scream out. He says nothing. He goes in a third time and he hit a nerve and nearly sent me off the table. I scream louder and said, "You just hit my nerve! Take it out!!" He says, "There's no nerves there." Now I'm pissed, in pain, and this moron says there's no nerves in your arm?! At this point, I'm yelling, "Take the f***ing needle out now and get the f*** away from me." This nurse was so lacking in compassion and humanity. He never smiled, introduced himself, or made me feel at ease in any way. If this is what Mexican medical care looks like, I'm scared for the patients. It makes me really appreciate American doctors and nurses and how much they care about their patients with real, genuine humanity.
The end of the story is: I was there until 8:00 a.m., never saw the dive medicine doctor, never got treatment except for oxygen, and was discharged. The oxygen really helped because by the time I left, the pain was 90 percent gone and the splotchy rash was faint. I flew home the next day without incident. Dangerous medical care, poor diving conditions, this is why I'll never go back to Cozumel.
Post Trip. The incompetent and reckless nurse's stabbing of my nerve left me with a damaged nerve in my hand. This may or may not be permanent, as nerve damage takes a very long time to recover and sometimes never does.
Every time I've gotten skin bends, I evaluate what could have contributed to it so as to not let it happen again. You're not supposed to do heavy exercise after diving, but I wonder if washing all my gear in the hotel bathtub, bent over with my head below my heart, already tired from six days of diving, then lifting heavy, wet gear and transferring it across the room to the balcony and hanging it up could have been a factor. This is not atypical for what I do on a daily basis when diving, though. I always rinse everything at the end of every dive day.
I was advised by a DAN medicine doctor several years ago that getting Nitrox certified may help in preventing skin bends, so it makes me wonder also if not having Nitrox on that last day could have contributed. There's so much mystery and nuance in dive medicine and dive injuries....
Part 3 will be some photos.
